Sunday, January 08, 2006

The marks are in

I didn't see it receive any substantial coverage, but the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives released a report card on the minority government last week:
One of Canada’s most persistent political myths is that only strong (read “majority”) governments are able to make meaningful change. The reality is frequently the reverse. Minority Parliaments have often been the most effective in terms of achieving real progress for people...

The real message of the Paul Martin/Ralph Goodale Economic and Fiscal Update is that, in their hands, our wealth is a kind of poverty. When a government deliberately and repeatedly understates its fiscal position on the pretence that solutions are unaffordable; when it sets targets to reduce debt and cut corporate tax rates, but none to reduce poverty; when it collects more revenue than it needs, but can’t remember that a $200 tax cut is a poor tradeoff for being unable to drink your tap water — then we are seeing a poverty of vision so profound it has forgotten its purpose.

They don’t need a mandate. They need a counterweight in Parliament to ensure that they don’t keep reneging on their promises to the electorate.

Overall, the Alternative Federal Budget awards the 2004–05 Martin Minority a C grade — for “some progress.”
The report card includes two "F" grades: on "fair taxes", where the NDP did manage to force some change but the fiscal update managed to undo that and more, and "health care privatization", which of course was the issue which brought the minority to a close when the NDP refused to be a party to continued Lib failure. Meanwhile, anybody looking for an "A" will be sorely disappointed.

The CCPA's review reminds us that as much progress as the NDP was able to make within the last Parliament, there's still an awful lot of work left to do to undo the damage of the mid-90s - and we certainly can't take PMPM's word as to any intention to get that work done. While the minority government was better than any of the alternatives, it'll take a much stronger NDP presence after this month's election to force any governing party to remember what policies matter most for Canadians.

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